According to Kurt McKee, founder and CEO of Fly.io, developers don’t really understand the term edge computing. They know they want to make their apps more responsive to the user. He believes that the traditional way of doing this through a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is the wrong approach and has launched Fly.io to efficiently deliver applications closer to the user.
Today, the company announced its $25 million Series B, which closed in June, as well as its $12 million Series A, which it raised last August.
The best way to think about Fly is as a new kind of public app that delivers apps around the world, wherever the end user is. It does not involve building its own data centers, at least not yet, but it does require installing hardware in various co-location facilities around the world.
“So we deploy our own hardware. We don’t build on others. [clouds]. Developers are building applications, especially real-time applications where responsiveness to user interaction is critical. So basically they just use us to ship their stack to whatever country they’re in,” Mackey explained.
If that sounds like Cloudflare or Akamai as a CDN to you, Mackie sees a big difference between what the company does and this approach. “My fresh view is that CDN is the wrong behavior for most developers building dynamic applications because what happens is you run your application in Virginia and then you put some of it on a CDN and put it on the CDN that’s closest to the users. You just put the application itself where it needs to be,” he said.
The company It launched in 2017 and has spent a lot of time refining the process of deploying hardware where it’s needed, and Mackey thinks he can continue to scale as the company grows from those lessons. In fact, he sees this as an operational problem rather than a financial one, rather than having enough money to finance the hardware.
“We have hundreds of thousands of apps at this point. And the types of users that are using us today are small teams of developers running full-stack apps in a database. They might be using like 50 or 100 gigs of data, but the servers we buy are so large that it’s easy to scale.” , we can support many customers with the first shipment.
The company helps the developers to deploy the application wherever they need it. He said the founders grew up using Heroku and tried to use that as a reference point when building the software side of the company. “The way you deploy an application is very similar to Heroku. You download the CLI and then run it in ‘fly launch’ and if all goes well, your application will be packaged and deployed to our cloud.
Mackey previously founded a company called MongoHQ, which changed its name to Compose before selling it to IBM in 2015. Although he is an experienced founder under his belt, he and his co-founders went through Y Combinator in Winter 2020. He said that he has benefited from the experience he has gained more than he thought. “I went in a little bit arrogant, and as I started talking to the partners there, I realized they knew more than I did because [they have dealt with] Thousands of companies, and their advice was incredibly helpful,” he said.
When the company exited Y Combinator and started talking to investors in the 2020 timeframe, many thought the idea of deploying their own physical hardware was silly, but they came around to it because they saw it was more expensive than running Amazon EC2 instances. And they were building a system where they could better control the cost.
The company currently has about 35 employees and is hiring. McKee says he’s giving a lot of thought to how to build a more diverse workforce, realizing that’s easier said than done.
“I think we’ve done a few things well to make progress, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that this is something that remains important but never gets resolved,” he said. One thing his company has done is look at people from different backgrounds instead of hiring the most experienced engineers he can find, and benefit from having those differences in perspective.
“I’d say one thing we’ve done well this time is basically being good at engineering management and giving people room to start early and then grow.
The company’s $25 million seed round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with support from Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Intelized Capital and PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert. The Series A was led by Intel Capital.
